Eid Mubarak

Well, well, well, do let it be noted that I outlived Elvis who died at 42 in 1977. And here I am starting my 44th year on this earth today.

Loads of emails, krabbels and phone calls from far away places and my sweet mum spoiling me rotten with mouthwatering Surinamese delicacies. The whole day was oozing with love.

Yet how I miss the voices of my cousin Faisja and dearest 'tante Mien'. Neither will know about these darling students of mine, my returning to NMO or whatever else life has in store for me.

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

Where no one sees you.

But sometimes I do,

And that sight becomes this art.

Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (Afghan poet 1202 - 1273)

Ramadan Round-up, part IV

Cheery chitchat in Amsterdam Slotervaart

As published in the Amsterdam Weekly, volume 5, issue 37

Most people flocking to Amsterdam usually only get to see cultural hotspots like the Rijksmuseum, Madame Tussauds, the famous canal houses, and - in a worse-case scenario - head for a joint at some local coffee shop. There is little chance they would visit areas that are considered ethnic trouble spots.

A prime example is Mercatorplein nicknamed Meccaplein, because of its relatievely high concentration of men and women donned in typically Islamic attire. And if you pop by you are either a Muslim yourself, a lost journalist, or in the mood for a cheap but first-rate kebab.

Okay, these exaggerations aside, for the last three years De Baarsjes has really been making an effort to reach out to non-Muslims during Ramadan. And, what’s more, it is one of the few neighbourhoods in the city, where you won’t be bumping into political bigwigs or be forced to listen to politically correct speeches. To be brutally honest, in the case of your Ramadan reporter, there was no speech at all, not even a welcoming one when she visited the the ROC Karel Klinkenberg in Amsterdam Slotervaart.

Yep, for those in the know, this edgy neighbourhood made headlines only two years ago when a policeman got shot. It catapulted neighbours and community representatives into action, organising all kinds of social events. And what better way to do this than through a lecture about the nuts and bolts of the Muslim fast, hand in hand with a delicious Ramadan iftar. Well, that was the idea anyway.

Time for a reality check. Yes, there was food, but the lecture got mysteriously cancelled and the whole idea behind a mixed seating arrangement did not work out quite well either. But of course there are always exceptions, like this one Dutch student: ‘Quite honestly I don’t know much about Muslims. That’s why I decided to come in the first place. And with all that political pressure that we should integrate … Well, here I am.’


And so, thanks to the lack of a lecture, Mr Student engaged in merry conversation with fellow table guests about the do’s and don’t of fasting, about the sudden popularity of working night shifts during Ramadan, but also about the differences to the Catholic fast.

After roughly half an hour more visitors finally began to trickle in, from elderly Dutch people who had been living in De Baarsjes since the 1960s, to veiled Moroccan mothers with their young ones. But still, no mixing whatsoever.

Then, at around a quarter to eight, something happened. People returned from the buffet table with plates laden with all kinds of oriental delicacies. And instead of returning to their original seats, Muslims and non-Muslims alike finally plucked up the courage and walked over to their neighbours. No tough speeches about integration. No harsh words about segregation. No crude remarks about the lacking organisation. Simply cheery chitchat about everyday life in Amsterdam Slotervaart.

Ramadan Round-up, part III

Mocro Pride Parade

Text as published in The Amsterdam Weekly, volume 5, issue 36

Once upon a time, way back in the fifties and sixties, Islam was regarded as something exotic, something exciting. And the first Muslim immigrants from the former Dutch colonies Indonesia and Surinam were treated with a great deal of respect.

This was still the case when Moroccan and Turkish immigrants arrived. They worked in factories, were usually poorly housed in B&Bs and every once in a while they would roll out their prayer rugs in the factory cafeterias.

Yet contrary to expectations, these Muslim newcomers did not return to their countries of origin. They stayed. Islam stayed. And all of a sudden words like Ramadan, Hajj and Koran made their way into the Dutch language. The country began to see a gradual increase of mosques. Still, everything was very much A-okay. Or so we thought…

For somewhere along the way things took a dramatic turn for the worse. ‘And now the word ‘Moroccan’ has become practically synonymous with crime or Islamic radicalisation,’ says Abdou Menebhi, while sipping his hot iftar soup at the Moroccan youth centre Argan in Amsterdam, where some sixty Dutch Moroccans gathered for a special Ramadan dinner party. The intention was to spur ideas on how to properly commemorate the fact that next year it will be exactly 40 years ago that Morocco and the Netherlands signed a treaty, enabling the Dutch to recruit Moroccan labourers.

The spirited Menebhi himself came to the Netherlands in 1974. He lashes out to Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen who in his opinion made matters even worse by telling the Moroccan community to take responsibility and reign in Moroccan troublemakers. ‘In case Cohen didn’t notice, we have been doing that for ages.’

While most of the guests are enjoying their food, listening to traditional Moroccan music and engaging in small talk, Menebhi gets even more worked up about the seemingly ignorance ‘regarding the role we played in Dutch trade unions, how we battled against far-right wing politicians like Jan Maat, how we took to the streets in the eighties to mourn the racial killing of Kerwin Duijnmeyer. This, too, is part of Dutch social history, yet people don’t know or don’t care.’

Menebhi’s views are shared by many dinner guests, including well-known Labour MP Khadija Arib and Mohamed Rabbae, a highly respected figure in the Dutch Moroccan community. Yet how to turn table talk into practice?

‘Well’, says Nadia Bouras, a migrations expert from Leiden University, ‘ this evening has brought on some very interesting ideas that need further exploration. We need to create a better awareness of our own Dutch-Moroccan history. A book or a museum perhaps. We need to have something that will make second and third generation migrants proud of who they are. Something that will rub off on the entire Dutch society forever.’


Photo credits

Khadija Arib

Abdou Menebhi

Mohamed Rabbae

Ramadan Round-up 2008, part II

Food for thought

As published in The Amsterdam Weekly, volume 5, issue 35

So what will your rambling Ramadan Reporter serve for dinner this week? For what it’s worth, you were this close to receiving a detailed account of the opening of the Polder Mosque on the first Friday of Ramadan.

But I decided against it. For one thing, the mosque in Amsterdam Slotervaart it is not half as unique as Dutch media make it out to be. Its major selling point is that men and women are allowed to pray together in the same room and that and the sermons are in Dutch instead of Arabic.

True, for the majority of Sunni Muslims it is perhaps a first, but for the roughly 10.000 followers of the Dutch chapter of Lahore Ahmadiyya Muslims– a reformist offspring of Sunni Islam that came into being around at the end of the 19th century, this really is very old hat indeed!

So where did your reporter go to then? Think a Moroccan host family el Filali. Think a very special dinner guest. Think Mrs Ella Vogelaar -our very minister of Integration. The meet, greet & eat, more aptly coined ‘hospitality dinner’, was set up by the organisers of the Ramadan Festival who launched this idea some three years ago. And this year more than a hundred Muslim families – and still growing - have already expressed their willingness to host a Ramadan evening for non-Muslims.

Sitting on a red leather sofa near a crackling fire Mrs Vogelaar was literally warming up for the iftar meal, while babbling away about the Dutch word ‘gezellig’ and the fact that there seems to be no proper English word that captures the essence of ‘gezellig.

At around 8.20 pm it was time to break the fast, and as custom requires, Mrs Vogelaar sank her teeth in dried dates and drank some cold milk, thus acting in accordance with Prophet Muhammad’s own iftar rituals.

As the evening got underway, Mrs Vogelaar explained she had never fasted before: ‘I come from a Protestant background, and we don’t have this tradition of fasting like for instance Catholics or Muslims have’.

Both Vogelaar and the Filalis believe in the concept of hospitality dinners as a way of getting to know each other on a much more informal basis. That said, I can’t help but wonder whether the elegantly furbished living room with an eastern touch of class, the wafts of mouthwatering Moroccan delicacies, and a CD of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum playing in the background would also work their magic on, say, Geert Wilders?

Vogelaar frowns and pauses a bit before answering with a twinkle in her eyes: ‘I am not sure whether it would be such a pleasure for the hosts to have him over as a guest, but why not, it would be a great idea indeed.’

Want to see it yourself? Then do watch NMO, Nederland 2, every Sunday at 14.30

The kick-off -your Ramadan Reporter returns

As published in this week's edition of the Amsterdam Weekly

Loads of delicious meals. Titilating music. Hilarious comedy. Captivating lectures. And all that for 30 days on end across the country. But here's the best part - drum roll, please - most of it is free of charge.

Yep. That's Islam for ya and probably a side most of you are not so familiar with. True, it only happens once a year and this it is: Ramadan 2008. To jog your memory about Ramadan, this is the name of the holiest month in the Islamic lunar calendar, as it was in this month that the Koran was revealed. For 30 days Muslims are not supposed to eat, drink, smoke or have sex between dawn and sunset, while staying away from impure thoughts, sights and sounds. It is a cleansing of body and soul, or at least in theory.

The kick-off for the Ramadan Festival was at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam West. More than 500 people attended, including staatssecretaris Ahmed Aboutaleb who opened the event. Like the previous ones, this year's festival is once again about dialogue, but this time the organisaton really made an effort to also invite the volk in the street, from representatives of the neighbourhood communities to students from Leiden University.

As Ramadan slowly moves up towards the summer months - due to the lunar calendar - it is getting harder and harder for Muslims every year to keep up the fast. And it showed. When the gong sounded at roughly 8.30 pm, heralding the breaking of the fast, it was almost like feeding a pack of hungry wolves. And that's where the organisation slipped up a bit. There was enough food, tons of it, but there were only ten, twelve waiters at best ... you do the math.

Other than that, it was a great first Ramadan night jazzed up with a performance of non other than Azhar Uzman a.k.a. The Ayatollah of Comedy, and one of the stars of the American tv-show Allah Made Me Funny.



But the Ramadan Festival has more to offer. You might want to check out the so-called Hospitality Dinners, where Muslim families treat non-Muslims to a typical Ramadan meal. Who thinks Muslims lose weight during Ramadan? Well, um, confession coming up ...: They don't! This may seem like a far cry from the essence of Ramadan, which is after all about frugal living, that said, Ramadan is also about giving a new dimension to the word 'hospitality'. So enjoy.

Ramadan Kareem